Post by Dracula on Feb 19, 2023 14:37:38 GMT -5
Emancipation(12/25/2022)
Emancipation is probably a movie that’s forever going to be known as the first Will Smith film to be released after the publicity hit he took in the wake of “the slap,” which maybe speaks to the fact that it’s not really a movie that’s good enough to transcend that situation despite certainly being a movie that aspires to be. The film is set during the civil war and follows a slave named Peter who is requisitioned by the confederate army to help build a base five miles away from the plantation he had been stuck in, separating him from his family. There he mounts an escape and must move across five miles of swamp while being pursued by a brutal slave hunter played by Ben Foster. From there the film feels almost more like an adventure movie than it does a more somber slavery drama like 12 Years a Slave, in fact it rather strongly resembles Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto more than anything. The morality of making such a wilderness survival film out of what is a pretty sensitive historical subject matter is… kind of dubious, and on some level I think director Antoine Fuqua knows this because he and cinematographer Robert Richardson saturate the colors in the film down almost to the point of being black and white. That’s an interesting decision but one that ultimately feels kind of gimmicky and frankly it’s not fooling anyone into making this feel more serious than it really is at its core. Fuqua has always primarily been someone who makes action movies and is usually at his best when he’s elevating B-movie hokum, and here he probably would have been better off just letting the carnage here look good on screen instead of trying to fool us into thinking this was a prestige project.
**1/2 out of Five
Emancipation is probably a movie that’s forever going to be known as the first Will Smith film to be released after the publicity hit he took in the wake of “the slap,” which maybe speaks to the fact that it’s not really a movie that’s good enough to transcend that situation despite certainly being a movie that aspires to be. The film is set during the civil war and follows a slave named Peter who is requisitioned by the confederate army to help build a base five miles away from the plantation he had been stuck in, separating him from his family. There he mounts an escape and must move across five miles of swamp while being pursued by a brutal slave hunter played by Ben Foster. From there the film feels almost more like an adventure movie than it does a more somber slavery drama like 12 Years a Slave, in fact it rather strongly resembles Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto more than anything. The morality of making such a wilderness survival film out of what is a pretty sensitive historical subject matter is… kind of dubious, and on some level I think director Antoine Fuqua knows this because he and cinematographer Robert Richardson saturate the colors in the film down almost to the point of being black and white. That’s an interesting decision but one that ultimately feels kind of gimmicky and frankly it’s not fooling anyone into making this feel more serious than it really is at its core. Fuqua has always primarily been someone who makes action movies and is usually at his best when he’s elevating B-movie hokum, and here he probably would have been better off just letting the carnage here look good on screen instead of trying to fool us into thinking this was a prestige project.
**1/2 out of Five
